Rail systems are well known for use in storing or conveying products such as garments in the manufacturing, retail and dry-cleaning industries. Conventional systems typically are of a monorail-type design, in which a single track or rail is formed into a closed loop by joining sections of V-shaped steel angle iron or cylindrical bars suspended from the ceiling. A number of wheeled trolleys used to convey garments suspended on hangers are movable along the upper surface of the rail. In use, the trolleys are mounted to the rail so that the trolley body is suspended directly beneath the rail, with the wheels engaging and movable along the upper rail surface. In some installations, the rails do not include trolleys, merely serve to support hangers on which garments are hung after cleaning. An example of this type prior art is shown in FIGS. 1 and 1A.
As seen in FIG. 1, the traditional assembly tool for dry cleaning operations is the hanger A with a closed loop B on which garments on clothes hangers are placed to assemble the order for delivery to the customer as shown in FIG. 1A. Traditionally, these hangers have been integral to the manual task of determining the location where processed clothing should be placed on the rail 14 or deciding which garments are grouped together or even locating the garments for delivery to the customer.
Traditionally, dry cleaning establishments have a customer service area in which the customer drops of the clothes to be cleaned and receives a claim ticket to retrieve the clothes after they have been cleaned. Garments are tagged with an inconspicuous permanent or semi-permanent scanable label to be used during processing. The garments are then taken to a common processing plant where they are cleaned, then folded or placed on an individual delivery hanger. At this stage of the operation, multiple customers' garments are intermingled, therefore the garments must be separated and matched with other garments left by the customer to complete the listing of garments on the customers ticket for delivery back to the customer. In some assembly installations, the worker scans the garment and an automated conveyor moves the conveyor carrying a plurality of hangers to a specific location for a particular hanger to be loaded with the individual garments on their individual delivery hangers. In others they have to manually match the garments to the location.
Many of these tasks are dependent upon the operator of the system being able to visually read the information contained on a printed form and attached to the hanger with the clip C shown in FIG. 1 and correlating that information with tags 16, such as those shown in FIG. 2, applied to the garments to control the flow of the garments through the system. That is to say, the employee has to search the rail and the multitude of tags and forms to determine where a particular garment should be placed for assembly. As a result, the level of skill and training for dry cleaning attendants is unnecessarily high and turn-over for failure to properly supervise the flow of garments is high.
Once the garments are assembled and a protective plastic bag is placed over them, the invoice corresponding to the claim ticket is attached to the bag and the complete hanger A can be moved to the racking station and placed in a specific location on the racking rail for retrieval when the customer returns.
It will be appreciated that there are some analogies between the dry cleaning process and other merchant delivery systems such as may be used in restaurants and the like.